I have been thinking about trying trolling from my PA. Anyone with lure suggestions that has tryed trolling. I will be fresh water and salt water fishing so any help will be great.

Rattle traps, long stick baits, little George spinners, and weighted swim baits would be a good place to start. I like trolling with crome colored crank baits that dive 5-8 feet deep on big lakes around rip-rap and rock banks.

Watch your speed and match the right lure or bait to that. I have found that most crankbaits don't run true above about 2.5 MPH. On the other hand, some of the slim baits, particularly the Storm Thinfins, don't really come to life until you get above 2 MPH. I regularly troll Thinfins at up to 4 MPH. It's a great trolling lure when you want to cover a lot of ground quickly to get dialed in on the fish.

What's your target depth for fishing, what size lure would you use, what speed are you comfortable pedaling, what line are you using (different resistance in the water), what assists if any do you need to get to the target strike zone (weights, long liner, D-diver), distance of lure behind kayak???? Do the math, catch the fish!!! Or have a friend use sonar to track your bait, and make a log of where your baits are running.

Here in Georgia, we use a saltwater style Umbrella Rig for Striped Bass. It's a reaction strike, not about being hungry... They See It They Want It!!! This is a scaled down version I made for the kayak. Trolled at 2 -3mph @ 120-150feet behind the kayak, they reach 18-20feet in the strike zone. These are deadly when you pull them through the school, if you have them in the zone you Will Get Bit, and sometimes with multiples.

They are stored in paintball tubes, and take up no space for their deadly ability.A bait retriever is a great way get back expensive baits stuck on the bottom.

What TGF has would work. Don't use anything with a lip, unless you don't have a specific depth in mind I normally use some shad swimmers (similar to TGFs) when trolling in a boat. We can't use them like TGF though. I think the max is 2 per line, maybe 3.

On another note about trolling, which I'd always thought of figuring out, is it would be d@mn near impossible to reel your line in, at a safe trolling speed of 2 MPH

With one of my reels, the ratio is 5.1:1....I would have to crank the reel over 6 times per second, to gain a decent trolling speed No way. LOL

CurtnAZ, How many inches of line returning do you get with each turn of the handle? I think you may have made a mathematical error because, if you check, I think that in order to retrieve line at 2 MPH, all you have to retrieve per second is a little less than a yard of line, which, as we all know, even at a ratio of 5.1:1 is quite doable. Unless, of course your spool has a very,very small diameter and is almost empty of line. Regards.......

If you get seriously interested in trolling from your PA, I highly recommend the book "Precision Trolling." It contains depth charts (line out/depth) for about 250 different crankbaits and is quite accurate if you use 10lb mono (conversion is supplied for braid and other sizes).

Then, get yourself a Daiwa (or similar) Accudepth reel ($60 at BPS) and you can put a bait at a precise depth at will.

The key is finding the fish, catching one and then being able to accurately duplicate the same depth over and over. This is a big key to productive trolling.

CurtnAZ, How many inches of line returning do you get with each turn of the handle? I think you may have made a mathematical error because, if you check, I think that in order to retrieve line at 2 MPH, all you have to retrieve per second is a little less than a yard of line, which, as we all know, even at a ratio of 5.1:1 is quite doable. Unless, of course your spool has a very,very small diameter and is almost empty of line. Regards.......

I'm building up my arsenal of reels and rods....but my main rod I use now (a cheapo Fenwick with an Abu Garcia Cardinal spinning reel has a 5:1 ratio. Maybe I screwed up somewhere....but from what I remember measuring, the spool was like 1.something inches in diameter, which gave a line length of 5.something inches per turn on the reel. So, Figure a mile is 5,280ft. or 63,360", and if you wanted to go 2 miles per hour, that would be 126,720"/hr....divided by 60 min/hr = 2112 in./min; divide by 60 seconds a minute = 35.2 in./sec. (which is just less than a yard; you're right) Now equate that into how many inches the reel brings in per turn....and there ya go. But, now take a reel, and spin the handle 7 times, in a second That's kinda crankin on it to me....

Yes, if you turn the handle of the reel 7 times, you will have the bail travel 35.7 times around the spool. If your spool was 3.5" in circumference,(not unreasonable), you would crank in 17.5 inches of line for every turn of the handle, so 2 turns of the handle per second would give you the required 2mph(35.7 inches). OTH, 7 turns per second could be done but for a very short period of time and your lure would be travelling at 6.5 MPH. I am making a conservative guess as to the diameter of your reel. (Your calculation only assumed a 1" circumference. of your spool.) If you take a measuring tape you will find that your assumption is an error. Regards.....

Ahhhh...LOL...That's what I screwed up on...the whole Pi thing Not sure how as I thought I figured that in. It's surprising to me that I didn't because that's how I've calculated average speed proximities for our M35A2s with larger tires, different gear, etc. WOW; I'm a clutz So, yeah, I would get over 2mph with 2 turns a second. Figured in that my spool was maybe 1.25" diameter... Boy do I feel stupid now